All but one of the major content platforms have banned the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as the companies raced to act in the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars website.

Facebook unpublished four pages run by Jones for “repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”….

Facebook’s and YouTube’s enforcement action against Jones came hours after Apple removed Jones from its podcast directory. The timing of Facebook’s announcement was unusual, with the company confirming the ban at 3am local time.

Twitter hasn’t taken down Jones yet. How odd that Twitter, with its demonstrable shadow banning and Twitter Gulag for conservatives, has not capitulated yet.

The takedowns did not just happen.

The media pushed these social media giants to this result, as a Senior Media Reporter for CNN bragged on Twitter and in interviews:

Not content, CNN was pushing for Jones APP to be shut down by Google and Apple. Of course, CNN doesn’t say it that way, it just runs stories wondering why the APP hasn’t been shut down. Not very subtle.

The targeted takedown of Jones was strategic.

Few people want to defend the substance of his content. So CNN gets to wrap itself in self-righteousness, even though it was an act by CNN of political activism.

And yes, these are private companies who can do what the government cannot. We understand that. But they have taken on a role approaching public utilities, without whom we can’t communicate politically.

This is something we’ve covered a lot in the past year, how an oligopoly of left-leaning high tech firms control virtually all of our social media interactions. In my dreadful 9th Anniversary post, I wrote:

If the assault on the Electoral College was the game changer for me, a runner up was waking up to implications of the concentration of power in a small number of social media and internet companies who have been weaponized to shut down speech and expression. Google, Facebook, Twitter and two handfuls of other companies now completely control our ability to communicate with each other, while internet backbone companies are poised to block internet access altogether.

Imagine living in a repressive country in which the government blocked access to and suppressed internet content. You don’t need to move. It’s coming here but from private industry. This is, in many ways, more dangerous than government suppression of free speech because at least in the U.S. the government is subject to the First Amendment, and can be voted out of office.

The social justice warriors have moved from shouting down speakers on campus to pressuring high tech companies to expand the definition of “hate speech” and “community standards” to the point that anything right of center is at risk.

It’s no surprise then that Prager U, a completely mainstream conservative educational group, has been fighting a running battle with YouTube over restrictions on its popular videos.

The problem is not limited to social media. There were attempts after the Parkland shooting to deplatform NRA TV:

It should surprise no one that what starts with an attack on 2nd Amendment rights quickly moved to an attack on free speech via the handful of internet oligopolies. Leftists have identified a weak point — private entities are not constrained by the 1st Amendment the way the government is, but they perform on the internet quasi-governmental functions over internet infrastructure and access….

If you think the attacks on the NRA are only about the 2nd Amendment, then you haven’t been paying attention. These people are totalitarian in nature, and that nature is on full display.

These social justice censors start with neo-Nazis, then define everyone who opposes them as the equivalent of neo-Nazis. So they move on to Alex Jones, then the NRA, and won’t stop until mainstream conservatives are banned.

Yet lunatic leftist #Resistance conspiracies proliferate on these same social media platforms without hindrance.

Left-wing activists are not afraid of establishing non-governmental guild controls that would effectively ban “fake news,” “hate speech,” “dangerous ideas,” etc. because they are confident they will define those terms. The sword of New Censorship is not double edged.

Spot on as well. The new censorship is welcomed in big tech as it is on campus. Because the leftist censors get to define the terms.

This battle is not about Alex Jones. Anyone who thinks it is, hasn’t been paying attention.

Actually, that’s national socialism. That’s a form of government in which the means of production are privately owned, but government controlled. (As opposed to communism, in which the government both controls and owns the means of production.) “Fascism” is a philosophy of government. It posits that the state is foremost and the people’s purpose is to serve the state. The two don’t always go together, but fascism’s most notorious iterations give the strong impression that they not only go together, but that they are the same thing or inseparable.

Actually the philosophy that the state is foremost and the people’s purpose is to serve the state is more national socialist than fascist. It was Hitler, not Mussolini, who said “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz”, and not just because if Mussolini had said it it would be in Italian.

You’re right that fascism is a more fully worked out philosophy than national socialism, because Mussolini was a genuine intellectual and Hitler was not. But one of the core ideas, if not the core idea of fascism is that big government, big business, and big labor should work together (i.e. collude) to make the whole country function well. The very name “fascism” comes from a bundle of sticks, representing the idea that when everyone works together they cannot be broken.

At any rate, what makes both of these bad is the involvement of government. Collusion between corporations without government is not and cannot be fascism, again by definition, because they are unable to use force to compel people. That’s why cartels are almost impossible without government behind them.

“We were the first to state, in the face of demo liberal individualism, that the individual exists only in so far as he is within the State and subjected to the requirements of the state and that, as civilization assumes aspects which grow more and more complicated, individual freedom becomes more and more restricted.” (To the General staff Conference of Fascism, in Discorsi del 1929, Milano, Alpes, 1930, p. 280).

many didn’t do so willingly. good example is diesel locomotive manufacturers during WW2, war time board would not let also, baldwin,fairbanks-morse produce engines used in them. only one allowed to make engines was emd with its 567 engine only due to it also being used in naval landing craft.
this gave emd a huge jump in development and production when ww2 ended. also, baldwin,fairbanks-morse never really recovered. took GE decades to catch up and surpass emd. irony is in 2015 emd produced NO locomotives (for US use, exports were made and shipped) due to (yup a government program) epa tier 4 regs.
norfolk western was not allowed to use roller bearings on their J class steam engines made during WW2 due to even selling them raw materials would have been illegal.
screwed no matter what.

To Rab: I also don’t follow InfoWars but what little I know is that he is a conspiracy theory nut. So when is Rosie O’Donnell banned for saying that (re: 9/11) was an inside job because “fire doesn’t melt steel”. How about banning the late nite radio show “Coast to Coast” which is chock FULL of conspiracy nuts (but a hoot to listen to on occasion)? George Orwell was prescient – instead of burning books – the lib-nazis now burn internet sites…

And now we know where you come from. Jones is a slimy piece of shit who deserves to be deplatformed, and if this were really about him we should applaud it. The only reason to be concerned is that he’s just the stalking horse and we’re next.

Mr, know-it-all Milhouse thinks it is OK to deplatform something which has no hate speech in it. He’s never listened to Jones, and thinks anyone that does is an extremist. He’s a confused person who reads too much while experiencing too little.

Bullshit. Publicly traded companies are private. They belong to their shareholders.

And no, “discrimination in the public realm by a business” is not illegal, as I’ve told you at least a dozen times. Private entities, no matter how they’re traded, have the right to accept or turn down customers on any grounds that they see fit, except those specifically prohibited by law.

Discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, disability, age above 40, and a few others are banned by US law. Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is not, so it’s perfectly legal to refuse straight customers, or gay ones, depending on your preference, anywhere except where a state or local law happens to forbid it. There are a lot of states and/or localities that do forbid it, though.

Discrimination on the grounds of political opinion, on the other hand, is only banned in a few places; in most of the US it is perfectly legal and the right of every person or entity. Unless you happen to be in one of those few places, you have every right to openly declare that you will not do business with Democrats. Or Republicans, if that’s your choice.

Hey everybody, read the sophistry Milhouse writes to this. Isn’t it OK to exclude certain types of people from a gold club? Watch how he dances around principles to assert that he is right and consistent.

What the hell are you talking about? Do you even know? Yes, of course it is OK to exclude anyone from a “gold club”, whatever that is, except on grounds specifically prohibited by law. Where did you get the idea that it wasn’t?

Meanwhile I’m still waiting for your apology. People, this is the idiot who accused me of lying, when I pointed out the plain and obvious truth that aliens are just as subject as citizens to conscription.

Hey everybody, read the sophistry Milhouse writes to this. Isn’t it OK to exclude certain types of people from a gold club? Watch how he dances around principles to assert that he is right and consistent.

Discrimination on the grounds of political opinion, on the other hand, is only banned in a few places; in most of the US it is perfectly legal and the right of every person or entity.

I hate to say it but Milhouse is probably right about this. Just review Citizen United vs FCC.

Personally, I think FB thinks they are more important they they really are. FB is for old people. They have done an excellent job of branding just like Starbucks convinced people to buy overly sugared coffee for 4 dollars when they could get the same thing some where else as a bottomless cup for 50 cents.

It will be interesting to see if they take down the New York Times and CNN when the Russia conspiracy theory goes bust.

Of course they won’t. They like the NYT and CNN, so why should they take them down? No, it’s not fair, but since when do they have to be fair? They’re private businesses, so they don’t have to be fair, any more than we do.

But they were right to come for the communists. We shouldn’t fall for the underhanded line that anything the nazis were against we should support. They also came for the criminals; do we object to that?

I have no problem with Communists or Nazis speaking, because I can refute their comments with my own speech. Pre-emptively silencing people, as the “social media’ outfits are doing, is Not A Good Thing.

The first step to addressing this de facto censorship by the loony left is to remove the section 230 protection from any platform that practices content control. If they are exercising editorial control then they are not entitled to any safe harbor protection for their actions. Call your congress persons and let them know how you feel about this.

On what grounds could the FCC license them? Since when is it the FCC’s business what they do? The entire basis of the FCC’s authority is the fiction that the broadcast spectrum “belongs” to the public, i.e. the government, so they can impose restrictions on how it’s used. And the basis on which it’s alleged that the spectrum belongs to the public is that it’s a limited resource. Cable TV, for instance, is not limited, therefore it isn’t even alleged to belong to the public, and therefore no license is required for it and the FCC has no control over it. How is the world wide web different?

I am convinced not enough people care. If they’ve even heard about this story, I believe too many assume Jones is the most vile person in America and deserved silence, because that’s how the media portray him.

I think Jones is a doofus, I’m not a fan whatsoever. But what I have seen of him is tame compared to the leftist. However, I do not think people see the big picture at all.

The left is scary as hell and will not stop unless someone stops them.

Does anyone have any experience with alternatives to Big-Left social media (e.g., Gab, https://gab.ai)? It’s portrayed in the media/echo chamber as a bastion for rascals, which leads me to believe it must be worth checking out.

And yes, these are private companies who can do what the government cannot. We understand that. But they have taken on a role approaching public utilities, without whom we can’t communicate politically.

So what? How does that give us a right to dictate to them? What is this, need creates a claim over others?! That’s pretty much the essence of socialism in one sentence.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and two handfuls of other companies now completely control our ability to communicate with each other, while internet backbone companies are poised to block internet access altogether.

And they have the right to do so. It’s their property; we have no right to use it without their consent.

Imagine living in a repressive country in which the government blocked access to and suppressed internet content. You don’t need to move. It’s coming here but from private industry.

Which makes it entirely different.

These social justice censors start with neo-Nazis, then define everyone who opposes them as the equivalent of neo-Nazis. So they move on to Alex Jones, then the NRA, and won’t stop until mainstream conservatives are banned. Yet lunatic leftist #Resistance conspiracies proliferate on these same social media platforms without hindrance.

Yes, and it’s not fair. But private entities don’t have to be fair. You don’t have to be fair. If you choose not to be, all your victims have the right to do is complain; they have no right to force you to be fair to them. So why are facebook, twitter, etc. different?

Anyone who opposed net neutrality (and that includes me) has no right to object to this.

The whole point of net neutrality was to prevent this sort of thing. We opposed it on principle, because the owners of resources have the right to use them as they choose, and to charge whatever they like for their use, or to deny their use to their competitors or those they don’t like. Well, that’s what’s happening here. Either we were right then and should shut up now, or we should admit we were wrong then; but that would mean we choose our principles depending on whose ox is gored, which isn’t much better.

I just say, check out the Citizen United ruling and also checkout that happened to Standard Oil with trust busting.
Then take a look at GE. Folks if you are going to take a position, you better start thinking a little deeper about this.

Outrage about FB is a surprise to be me. I would think that the best weapon against FB is an alternative counter product not government intervention.

When I saw this about facebook, I laughed so hard and when I played this for my Millennial friends, they agree, Facebook is for old people.

What net neutrality law? It’s gone, remember? And we all cheered when it was dumped.

Antitrust laws are illegitimate and unprincipled “progressive” assaults on private property, which conservatives are supposed to be against. They were created by the “progressives” out of pure bloodthirsty hatred and envy for John Rockefeller.

What’s the difference between demanding that facebook give one a platform and demanding that colleges give one free education, restaurants free dinners, landlords free housing, doctors free care, or the government free money?

the biggest difference is these particular platforms have editorial protections under the law

the Republicans could easily crush Facebook, Twitter, and the various internet platforms that want to censor against not-Left by opening them up to liability to anything and everything that is published on their platforms

see right now – they have the right to editorial power without any of the drawbacks because no one can sue them for malcontent

that means in layman terms is Twitter can have numerous flame wars with both sides spreading .01% of the truth in any tweet and Twitter could never be held accountable for that content published

because they are protected as this “neutral” platform

I think we can all agree – they stopped being neutral long before DJT became President so let us open them up to the courts

if the Republicans start stripping the big internet giants like Facebook and Twitter of their “neutrality”, then this type of protest goes away

because the alternative for Facebook and Twitter is to make their website like a news outlet which will require far more oversight

If they’re government entities, or enjoy a government-enforced monopoly, then they have to be fair, and they’re subject to the first amendment. But if the electricity company is completely private, and it’s lawful to compete with it, why should it have to sell electricity to people whose opinions it doesn’t like?

When I set up and ran some bulletin boards/fora, they had nothing whatever to do with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, etc etc. So no action by any of these could inhibit my international readership. This situation persists—the WWW is far bigger than a few Big Tech outfits.

Now, I made no money off any of my sites, and never tried to do so. I never even tried to make them pay for themselves. Is that the problem? Are we all riled up about freedom of speech, or Leftoid suppression of the right to petition for redress of grievances? Or is the issue just about finances? Perhaps a new business model—one not so perilously dependent on the whims of our enemies— is the solution.

It’s a troubling situation and not one with an easy solution either. These social media platforms are a BIG part of how many people do business nowadays and to lose access to them can potentially ruin both people and the businesses they run. However as has been pointed out many of them are U.S. based private businesses and as such have a lot of leeway to control themselves the activity of their platforms. There’s almost nothing the U.S. government can do that won’t involve legislation and/or regulation to address the concerns raised here. The simple solution might be to require these companies to respect people’s 1st amendment rights but that might be unpalatable to anybody who can’t stand our government engaging in anything that might seem socialist or fascist in nature. There definitely are those who would view the U.S. gov doing anything of the sort as exactly that no matter how light a touch it uses.

Let’s face it, Milhouse is correct. I am therefor officially switching my opinion on net neutrality. I have “evolved”, in Obama-speak. But even that is not perfect, since the FCC is a political body and can be just as partisan as YouTube. But at least when we get stuffed at the FCC there will be a public record, not the Star Chamber that currently exists.

At the same time I am taking the advice of FineReport; I have never been on FB or Twitter and will not start. I will never go back to YouTube (my biggest sacrifice) and I will start using Walmart.com instead of Amazon. As for Apple, I think I am trapped.

Alex Jones, you magnificent bastard! All of this banning you on social media platforms will increase your website traffic, making you into a marketable commodity.

Seriously.

My rule in following Alex Jones has been “divide by 6 to get the truth.” And there is much to be found, assuming you have the patience to wade through the minutiae/crap to find it.

But he should be sending “Thank You notes” to the Obamas and the Clintons as well as to the Alphabet Corporation, Apple, Facebook and the other social media companies for making him a soon to be very rich man.

The law (such as the Communications Decency Act) is structured so that you have two types of companies sharing content on the Internet: either “content providers” who have no editorial control over the content that is transmitted over their systems, and “publishers” who are liable for all content transmitted on their systems.

The line is when a company exerts any sort of editorial control. When they do they lose the safe harbor of laws like the Communications Decency Act. This makes them liable for every. single. byte of data that passes through their systems–for every copyright violation, for every license claim, for every patent claim. In essence it will make them liable as co-defendants–as they are now “publishers” rather than “content providers.”

Waiting for someone to drag Google or Facebook into a lawsuit over something completely unrelated seeking a deep pocket for their copyright lawsuit.

We allowed them to change the subject from Candace Owens pulling off perhaps the most brilliant tactical stunt from the Right I’ve seen in my career to now locking arms with a fraud most of us wouldn’t voluntarily grant a platform to, either. All because we let the Left bait us into its premise once again. We are now defending Jones’ indefensibility to defend ourselves, at the same contradicting our own arguments in support of Christian bakers and florists, and now a sizable chunk of us are even for the authoritarian government we’ve long fought from the Left, provided Trump does it.

They’re private to the extent their securities are regulated by the federal and state government – which is not small.

And they are private to the extent they are entangled with the government (as Odumbo and General Electric/Google/Facebook/Etc.; btw, Odumbo did not have the brains to do all the damage he did – he’s just the goofball face of the likes of Soros, etc.)

Not that long ago, someone claiming that there was a “Deep State” effectively encompassing all the major U.S. intelligence agencies and much of the U.S. government, and claiming that said agencies colluded amongst themselves to defraud the American people of their preferred choice for President via coordinated lies and abuse of government rules and systems, would have been excoriated as a “conspiracy nut”.

The type of speech whether hate or free expression, is not the issue – it’s acts/actions taken in the name of said speech that’s the issue for libs. The standard being whether or not said speech triggers a liberal, or motivates someone to act contrary to liberal ideals. It really comes down to the silly notion of “don’t give ’em any ideas.”

I wish instead of hiding their motives behind nebulous standards of conduct, they had to publish something like an impact assessment; i.e., “Alex Jones content promotes … which incites … and thereby harms community …”, etc.

But then of course that would make it easy for conservatives to fight back by exposing liberals many double-standards (‘do as I say, not as I do’).

For me, the lack of quotes in the Washington Post article carried by my local paper was a dead giveaway. The headline for the article included the words “hate speech,” but included nothing about any such speech.

That kind of echoing lack in a news article is a sure indicator that the real objection was to political speech, which is of course the protected variety.

Valerie, you’ve sparked a curiosity for me – specifically, when a local paper runs an article from a larger paper or the AP, do they run with the original (same) title, or does the editor generate a new one tailored to their demographic / political slant? Lord knows I’ve observed CNN tweaking headlines to make them more sensational / incendiary, etc. But I’ve always viewed their stuff as original / in house where they could edit on the fly, headlines included. I’ve never specifically looked at AP / WaPo articles for content / headline tweakage by re-print publications.

Headlines are always supplied by the publication, not the original source. Even for in-house pieces, the headline is not supplied by the writer but by a copy editor, who has not always bothered to actually read the piece first.

Sometimes they change the headlines, mostly not. Sometimes the paper of origin changes the headlines.

I don’t know why you view CNN stories as original with them. Much of their political reporting shows up first in the Washington Post or the New York Times, and yes, they frequently tart it up. I see no principled difference between CNN and Alex Jones, although I haven’t heard of Alex Jones doxxing any private citizens or encouraging violence against American voters.

Thanks. About CNN, I’m probably blurring the lines between CNN the channel and CNN the web site. I never watch CNN, or look at their site other than to check headlines to satisfy my curiosity of “what Trump hate do they have today?” That I am at all familiar with CNN has to do with my elderly father, who lived with me for several years and watched CNN 8 hours a day until he died. It took 6 mos. just to train him to turn it off when I came into his room to talk. That elder care is so exhausting, my political intake has been more or less limited to LI, NR, Hotair, Reason.